group

Automated Software Testing (AST) group at fortiss and TUM.

Our research sits at the intersection of software engineering and AI. We build testing techniques that make AI-enabled systems, from deep learning components to autonomous vehicles and LLM-based applications, robust, reliable, and safe. Our tools and replication packages are on GitHub.

PhD Students

Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi · PhD candidate (2023–)
Sim-to-real gap and real-world testing of autonomous driving systems
Xingcheng Chen · PhD candidate (2023–)
Explainability-guided test generation for deep learning systems
Lev Sorokin · PhD candidate (industrial PhD with BMW) (2023–)
Search-based testing of autonomous driving systems and LLM-based applications
Oliver Weißl · PhD candidate (2024–)
Generative test input generation and boundary testing of deep learning systems


Visiting Students

Davide Yi Xian Hu
Qurban Ali
Maryam
Davide Jannussi
Leonardo Tiso
Debora Russo
Manfredi Napolitano


Completed Theses & Student Projects

Since 2023 we have supervised 45 MSc theses, 20 BSc theses, and 9 guided research projects, seminars, and internships. Many of them led to publications and open-source tools.

2026 (24)
  • Ruben Kaiser. Multi-modal Boundary Testing of Vision–Language Models. MSc thesis, with Oliver Weissl (fortiss).
  • Emily Louise Kissel. Evidence-Grounded LLM-based Requirement Coverage Analysis of System Model Elements. BSc thesis, with Konstantin Blaschke (fortiss).
  • Stefania Mocan. Reference Claim Verification in Scientific Writing: Design and Evaluation of a Semi-Automated Approach. MSc thesis, with Florian Angermeir (fortiss), Mark Kreitz (Bundeswehr University Munich).
  • Yulan Xie. Feature-Aware Testing via Diffusion Hidden Space Interventions. BSc thesis, with Xingcheng Chen (fortiss).
  • Umut Deniz Zorgül. Automation for Linking Cross-References in Semi-Structured Regulations (Legal Documents): A Feasibility Study. MSc thesis, with Parisa Elahidoost, Hugo Ricardo Guarín Villamizar (fortiss).
  • Hussein Mohamed. Automated Standards Mapping for Cybersecurity Compliance. MSc thesis, with Florian Angermeir (fortiss).
  • Ivan Vasilev. Search-based Testing of In-Car Conversational Systems. MSc thesis, with Lev Sorokin (BMW). 🏅 SANER 2026 paper
  • Anna Schmitt. A Model-Based Product-Line Engineering Approach for the Analysis of Voltage Stability in Low-Voltage Electrical Grids. MSc thesis, with Markus Duchon, Simon Barner (fortiss).
  • Berk Kerem Bercin. Mapping Cloud Scheduling and Optimization Algorithms to Customer Energy Management (CEM) Systems. MSc thesis, with Mahsa Faraji Shoyari (fortiss).
  • Ahmed Elsherif. Forecasting Urban Solar Panel Deployment with Remote Sensing Using Machine Learning. MSc thesis, with Jessy Matar (fortiss).
  • Maximilian Amougou Mbida. Agentic Artifact-based Evaluation of the Reproducibility of Software Engineering Research. MSc thesis, with Florian Angermeir (fortiss).
  • Eduardo Breitembach Appio. Counterfactual Analysis in Multimodal Latent Spaces for Deep Learning Models. MSc thesis, with Oliver Weissl (fortiss).
  • Xuan Phuoc Bui. Impact of Crawling Strategies on Automated Model Inference for Web Application Testing. MSc thesis. Code
  • Yanis Xabier Wilbrand Peña. Adversarial Attacks on ASR via TTS Latent Manipulation. BSc thesis, with Oliver Weissl (fortiss).
  • Zhanpeng He. Automated Test Generation with LLM-Based Oracles. MSc thesis, with Stefan Winter (LMU).
  • Ma Xun. Simulation-to-Reality Gap Mitigation in Autonomous Driving Systems. MSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi (fortiss).
  • Timo Götz. A Framework for the Validation of Acoustic Measurement Data in Automotive Engines. BSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi (fortiss).
  • Matthias Weil. On-Vehicle Robustness Assessment of Camera and LiDAR Perception under Sensor Perturbations. BSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi (fortiss). 🏅 ASE 2026 paper
  • Berkay Geyik. Automated Web Apps Model Inference using Large Language Models. MSc thesis.
  • Kilic Dilruba. Automated Web Element Locators Generation using Large Language Models. MSc thesis.
  • Berfin Dinler. Combining Multiple Simulation Fidelities for Testing Autonomous Driving Systems. MSc thesis, with Lev Sorokin (BMW). 🏅 ICSE 2027 paper
  • Adnan Fidan. Ensemble-based Virtual Testing of Automated Driving Systems. MSc thesis, with Lev Sorokin (BMW).
  • Chen Yang. Automated Benchmarking of Interior Scene Understanding Systems in the Automotive Domain. MSc thesis, with Lev Sorokin (BMW). 🏅 ASE 2026 paper
  • Maxim Alexander Prince Igenbergs. Dual-Axis Testing of Visual Robustness and Topological Generalization in Vision-based End-to-End Driving Models. BSc thesis, with Xingcheng Chen (fortiss).
2025 (28)
  • Yunus Melih Gözütok. Multi-Layer Mutation Testing for E2E Web Applications Testing. MSc thesis. Code
  • Tuna Karacan. DragGAN-Based Adversarial Testing for Deep Neural Networks. MSc thesis, with Oliver Weissl (fortiss). Code
  • Gökce Sengün. Assessing Neural Reality Gap Input Mitigation for System Level Autonomous Driving Testing. MSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi (fortiss).
  • Ignacio Alejandro García Nunez. Industrial Product Backlog Exploration: Potential and Limitations of NLP-based Analyses for Security Purposes. BSc thesis, with Florian Angermeir (fortiss), Fabiola Moyón (Siemens).
  • Mehmet Beşenk. Adversarial Testing of Transformer Models with XAI Techniques. MSc thesis, with Xingcheng Chen (fortiss). 🏅 ESEM 2026 paper
  • Arkadii Sapozhnikov. Mutation-Based Assertion Generation Agent. Guided research, with Pouria Derakhshanfar (JetBrains).
  • Iurii Zaitsev. Test Repair Agent. Guided research, with Pouria Derakhshanfar (JetBrains).
  • Nataliia Severynenko. GenAI to Detect and Extract Requirements from Security Standards: A Feasibility Study. MSc thesis, with Florian Angermeir (fortiss), Fabiola Moyón (Siemens).
  • Magnus Kühne. Development and Evaluation of a native iOS/WatchOS Application for Recreational Scuba Diving. BSc thesis, with Florian Angermeir (fortiss).
  • Başak Balci. A Taxonomy of Test Case Breakages in the Web Application Domain. MSc thesis.
  • Burak Emre Özer. Zero-Shot Domain Expansion for Testing Autonomous Vehicles with Diffusion Models and LLMs. MSc thesis, with Davide Yi Xian Hu (PoliMi).
  • Jana El Kari. Implementation and Evaluation of an ML-Assisted Requirements Engineering Quick Check. MSc thesis, with Daniel Mendez, Anton Luckhardt.
  • Constantin Carste. Towards Neural Simulation for Autonomous Driving Systems Testing. BSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi (fortiss). 🏅 ASE 2026 paper
  • Sedat Dalkiran. Integration of Artificial Intelligence for Predictive Maintenance in River-based Energy Production Systems. MSc thesis, with Georg Walder (Energyminer).
  • Jeongrim Kim. Unsupervised Group Action Detection via Disentangled Representation Learning. MSc thesis, with Carlos Valle (fortiss).
  • Skander Jneyeh. Development of a Scaled IoT-Enabled Traffic Light System for Mixed Reality Autonomous Vehicle Testing and Simulation. BSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi (fortiss).
  • Cristian Sebastián Cubides Herrera. Simulation-to-Reality Gap Mitigation in Reinforcement Learning: Analyzing Observational and Dynamical Shifts in Smart Grids and Self-Driving Systems. MSc thesis, with Camilo Amaya (fortiss). Code
  • Jonas Stempel. Benchmarking Scene Understanding for the In-Car Domain. MSc thesis, with Ken E. Friedl (BMW).
  • Ziyad Mourabiti. Enhancing Photovoltaic Detection Using Generative AI for Super-Resolution Satellite Imagery. MSc thesis, with Jessy Matar (fortiss), Zhiwei Han, Jimmy Tekle.
  • Betül Karagöz. Towards Automated Page Object Generation using Large Language Models. MSc thesis. 🏅 ICST 2026 paper
  • Oğuz Gögebakan. On the Impact of Requirements Smells in Prompts: The Case of Automated Sequence Diagram Creation. MSc thesis, with Jannick Fischbach (fortiss).
  • Mert Şahin. On the Impact of Requirements Smells in Prompts: The Case of Automated Code Generation. MSc thesis, with Jannick Fischbach (fortiss).
  • Kasun Vimukthi Chamara Kanaththage. Deep Siamese Neural Approaches for Near-Duplicate Detection in Web Application Testing. MSc thesis. 🏅 ICST 2026 paper
  • Ruben Kaiser. Visualizing Token Importance in Large Language Models. Guided research, with Xingcheng Chen.
  • Qianqian Jia. Comprehensive Evaluation of Failure Prediction Methods. MSc thesis, with Xingcheng Chen.
  • Ghita El Alaoui Talibi. Ensuring Data Quality in Event Log Generation for Process Mining. MSc thesis, with Oleksandr Kosenkov (fortiss).
  • Wafa'a El Abu-Sa'dah. A Secondary Study on Legal Text Processing Solutions for Developing Compliant Software Systems. MSc thesis, with Oleksandr Kosenkov (fortiss).
  • Daria Tarasova. Implementation and Evaluation of an AI-based Educational Chatbot Assistant for Requirements Engineering. MSc thesis, with Daniel Mendez (fortiss).
2024 (15)
  • Kamran Aliyev. Adaption of Pipeline for Machine-Learning Based Schedulability Analysis for Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Systems. Internship, with Octavio Delgadillo Ruiz (fortiss).
  • Mirena Flores Valdez. Design and Implementation of a ROS-Based Mixed Reality Framework for Autonomous Small-Scale Vehicles: Bridging the Gap Between Simulation and Reality. BSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi. 🏅 ASE 2025 paper
  • Luca Kollmer. Improving Web App Model Inference with Transformer-Based Near-Duplicate Detection. BSc thesis. Code
  • Rafael Giebisch. Large Language Model Based Automated Evaluation for Factual Correctness and Consistency for In-Car Conversational Question Answering Systems. MSc thesis, with Ken Friedl (BMW). Code · 🏅 IV 2025 paper
  • Franz Kunze. Operationalized Software Architecture Documentation. BSc thesis, with Jonathan Streit (itestra). Code
  • Vera Julienne Kowalczuk. Large Language Model-based Code Translation between Programming Languages. MSc thesis, with Franz Blaim (Dr. Johannes Heidenhain GmbH). Code · 🏅 EMSE 2026 paper
  • Damiana Todorova. Benchmarking XPath Locator Generation Algorithms for GUI-Based Automated Testing: A Case Study in BMW's Software Environment. BSc thesis, with Leif Batato (BMW).
  • Timo Kühne. Similarity Classification of HTML with Large Language Models. Seminar. Code
  • Lutian Zhang. Search-based Testing of Automated Driving Systems Guided by Support Vector Machines. BSc thesis, with Lev Sorokin.
  • Shangsu Feng. XAI guided Test Generation from Latent Space. BSc thesis, with Xingcheng Chen.
  • Amr Abdellatif. Unveiling Deep Learning Systems Behaviors through Latent Space Exploration. MSc thesis. Code · 🏅 TOSEM 2025 paper
  • Alvaro Pérez-Lozao Alonso. Machine Learning-Based Identification of Factors Leading to Vehicle OTA Campaign Exclusions. MSc thesis, with Stefan Postler (Mercedes-Benz AG).
  • Kohei Dozono. Dynamic Secure Code Review with Large Language Models. MSc thesis, with Tiago Espinha Gasiba (Siemens AG). 🏅 ICSEW 2026 paper
  • Linfeng Guo. Integrating Explainable AI and Semantic Segmentation for Advanced Failure Prediction in Autonomous Driving. BSc thesis, with Xingcheng Chen. Code
  • Bengisu Duran. Evaluation of Coverage Criteria in Deep Neural Network Testing. BSc thesis, with Fathiyeh Faghih (fortiss). Code
2023 (7)
  • Ghita El Alaoui Talibi. Data Challenges and Requirements for Process Mining in Practice. Guided research, with Oleksandr Kosenkov.
  • Jana El Kari. Designing an International Study on the Influence of Human Factors on Requirements Engineering. Guided research, with Daniel Mendez, Anton Luckhardt.
  • Wafaa N. Abu Sa'dah. Secondary Study on Semantic Meta-data Models for Processing of Regulations. Guided research, with Oleksandr Kosenkov.
  • Hannes Leonhard. Benchmarking Self-Driving Cars Robustness: A System-level Testing Framework. BSc thesis, with Stefano Carlo Lambertenghi. 🏅 SCICO 2026 paper 🏅 ICST 2025 paper
  • Luca Kollmer. An Empirical Assessment of Neural Embeddings Techniques for Web Testing. Seminar.
  • Anton Kluge. Web Element Relocation in Evolving Web Applications: Enhancing the VON Similo Approach. BSc thesis. Code · 🏅 EMSE 2026 paper
  • Ruben Grewal. White-Box Failure Prediction for Autonomous Driving Systems using Uncertainty Quantification. MSc thesis. Code · 🏅 ICST 2024 paper